Robert Morelli wrote:
> To be entirely frank, I am put off by the style of your comments.
My annoyance with regard to your (largely unsubstantiated) points was
probably apparent in my style.
> If you disagree with my answer to the subject of this discussion,
> you should point the original poster to what you think is a
> discussion of large scale functional design, or present your own
> explanation for why it doesn't exist. I would be genuinely interested
What is large-scale OO design, then?
Most of the methodologies (abstraction, layering, tools such as UML) I'm
aware of translate more-or-less directly to (stateful) FP in general,
and OCaml in particular as it provides OO abstraction as well as functional.
> in what you have to say. But instead, you have chosen to veer off into
> rhetoric, advocacy, and ad hominem distractions. I am puzzled by your
First of all, I apologize if my points appeared to be ad hominem
attacks, they were not intended as such. I'm still curious as to your
amounts of relative experience in different languages and paradigms -
that was a question, not an attack - and I may have veered too far into
speculation about common reasons why people may draw the kinds of
conclusions you seemed to be implying in your posts. It was
speculation, not assertion.
> citing points about Erlang and concurrent variants of ML that sound
> superficially to be relevant, but which have no real bearing on
> anything I said. I disagree with the frequent use of this mailing list
You were citing increased need for parallelism as a reason for FP to
become less relevant in the future; I think that specific examples of
combining concurrency and functional approaches are valid counterexamples.
Please be specific as to why they aren't relevant.
> to irrationally promote OCaml as a superior language to Java. It is not
What criterion are used to evaluate superiority are of course extremely
subjective. Personally I consider expressiveness to be very important.
Do you disagree that OCaml is more expressive (i.e. there are more
things that can be concisely expressed in OCaml but not in Java than
vice versa)?
If there are things that you find are simple to do in Java (preferably
as a language rather than through its library collection) but not in
OCaml, I'd very much like specific examples.
It's entirely valid to disagree on the importance of expressiveness, or
whether providing a variety of tools for abstraction vs. concentrating
on a single paradigm is better.